


The Least They Could Do

by SpraceJunkie



Category: Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, PTSD, Panic Attacks, Post-Endgame, also all of Peter's high school, and by me seeing endgame again, and thinking about those aliens that looked like dogs, loosely inspired by that one tumblr post u know the one, the ones that chased clint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2020-04-23 08:21:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19147174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpraceJunkie/pseuds/SpraceJunkie
Summary: The first time anyone had noticed it was the third day back at school. Midtown School was a bizarre mix of kids who should have been in their twenties but weren’t and kids who had been in fourth grade what felt like a day ago to the people who’d been dusted. Nobody was quite sure how to interact with anyone anymore, but the kids who’d come back from the dead needed the normalcy of going to school even if they should have already graduated and the kids who’d kept growing up needed the normalcy of going to school even if their older siblings were suddenly their younger siblings. School was scheduled. The bell rang and they went to class and took tests and wrote essays and did homework and everything felt so normal.And Peter Parker needed that more than anything. He walked up the steps on the first day back and hugged his best friend with tears in both their eyes and he went to high school so he could feel like everything was normal again.It wasn’t.





	The Least They Could Do

Peter Parker was scared of dogs.

He hadn’t been before the dusting, but he was now, and everyone knew it. Any dog too big to fit in a purse made him shrink back and blink too quickly and swallow hard.

The first time anyone had noticed it was the third day back at school. Midtown School was a bizarre mix of kids who should have been in their twenties but weren’t and kids who had been in fourth grade what felt like a day ago to the people who’d been dusted. Nobody was quite sure how to interact with anyone anymore, but the kids who’d come back from the dead needed the normalcy of going to school even if they should have already graduated and the kids who’d kept growing up needed the normalcy of going to school even if their older siblings were suddenly their younger siblings. School was scheduled. The bell rang and they went to class and took tests and wrote essays and did homework and everything felt so normal.

And Peter Parker needed that more than anything. He walked up the steps on the first day back and hugged his best friend with tears in both their eyes and he went to high school so he could feel like everything was normal again.

It wasn’t.

Peter Parker was scared of dogs, now. More than scared. Terrified. So terrified it took all of his willpower not to curl up in a ball and cry for help when, on his third day back at school, a big German shepherd barked at him from the sidewalk.

Since he’d been bitten by the spider that turned his life upside down, that sometimes happened. Animals could tell he wasn’t quite fully human anymore. Some didn’t mind, and some did.

Before the battle with Thanos, before he’d been dusted and brought back in the middle of a fight for his life, before he was scared of dogs, that hadn’t mattered much to him. He just moved away from a dog if it didn’t like him and moved on.

But after all of that.

Well.

Peter Parker was terrified of dogs.

So his class, including the kids who’d been five years younger last time he would have had the chance to see them, learned that he was terrified of dogs on the third day back at school.

He hadn’t seen the dog. It was on a leash, of course, and held close to its owner’s side as they made their way through the rush of teenagers heading up the steps to school. Peter Parker passed within a couple feet of it, close enough for it to smell him, and it started barking and pulling at the leash like it wanted to jump on him.

His spidey sense hadn’t really stopped going off since the battle, but it almost crippled him seconds before the first bark, and the first bark sent him spiraling into a panic.

His class noticed, the dog’s owner noticed, and it only took a few seconds for the crowd to clear a path for the dog to be dragged to and a squad of people Peter only knew in passing to get him up the stairs and through the doors. Somebody passed him a bottle of water and somebody else pulled his backpack off and sat him down on a bench and somebody else found Ned, who sat with him until he could keep his eyes open and his breathing went back to normal.

So after that, people knew that Peter Parker was scared of dogs.

It was a fact added to the list of things people knew about Peter Parker that they didn’t ever bring up to him.

Like that Peter Parker was Spider-Man.

Everyone knew it, but nobody would ever say anything.

He jumped fences, hid an extra suit under the broken lockers, mixed what was obviously something to do with Spider-Man’s webs in the drawers of his lab bench, he worked, or used to work, for Tony Stark in an internship nobody else in the entire school had ever heard of, even though everyone at Midtown would have killed for an opportunity like that.

It hadn’t taken long for the rumor to start, and it had taken even less time for people to be positive they were right.

Then, Spider-Man had disappeared with Iron Man when he went into space, and Peter had disappeared off the bus at the same time his ship was leaving. Plus, Ned’s distraction wasn’t exactly overwhelming, and a good number of them had seen him stick to the side of the bus before swinging off towards the action.

And so obviously, since they knew Peter Parker was Spider-Man and they knew Peter Parker was scared of dogs, they figured it was connected.

After all, he hadn’t been scared of dogs before the snap, and he was absolutely terrified of them now.

So everybody knew Peter Parker was Spider-Man, and everyone knew Peter Parker was scared of dogs, but nobody really knew the extent of it, and nobody really understood why.

He wasn’t great at talking.

He’d tried to explain it to Ned. To explain the...the things in Thanos’s army. The things that were almost like dogs, that snarled and growled and ran at him in a pack on four legs until even instant kill mode couldn’t hold them off. And yeah he’d been saved in what he had to admit was a pretty awesome rescue involving Captain America and Thor’s hammer, but he couldn’t escape the snarling, horrible mouths of those things every time he fell asleep.

He had a lot of nightmares that left him waking up shaking and crying silently. He spent a lot of late nights wrapped in Aunt May’s arms. He tried a lot of times to get the nightmares and the way they made him feel into words, and never quite managed.

He looked down when he walked so he wouldn’t have to see every dog walking past him and jumped every time a dog barked on the street. Even in the suit, when he should have felt the safest because the suit protected him, he shied away from dogs when he saw them. The suit had failed against the alien dogs in Thanos’s army, and there was a constant, overwhelming fear present in the back of his mind that if a dog jumped at him, the suit would fail again.

His classmates did their best to help him without him noticing. When there was a dog in the crowd in the morning, they cleared a path to get it away before it and Peter could notice each other. They took note of things that bothered him when they happened in school.

The way he went so silent whenever anyone mentioned Tony Stark. The way he blinked so fast when somebody yelled too close to him in the hallway. The way he flinched when somebody reached out to touch him without warning.

Obviously, he’d changed. He’d been hurt, was still hurting, and he needed support.

But more than anything, just like everyone, he needed things to be normal.

So the things they knew about Peter Parker mostly spread in whispers, and so did the ways they could help.

Don’t touch him in the hallway.

Don’t yell too loud too close to him.

Don’t bring up Tony Stark. In fact, don’t bring up the Avengers.

Keep the dogs away from him.

But don’t let him know about any of it. Don’t talk to him any differently. Don’t act overly friendly. Don’t act overprotective.

Let him be normal at school, but make it easier for him to be normal.

Because everyone knows Peter Parker is Spider-Man, and that means he’s dealing with twice as much as everyone else.

He lost Iron Man, he lost Black Widow, just like everyone else. He died and came back, just like exactly half of everyone in the universe had. He was dealing with being five years younger than he should have been while feeling like he shouldn’t be, just like the same half of the universe was.

But he was also still dealing with being Spider-Man. Almost every night there was a new story of Spider-Man swooping in and saving the day, doing everything from getting a cat out of a tree to stopping a bank robbery to being spotted helping the remaining Avengers with something bigger. He was a hero.

Peter Parker was a hero who’d fought to save the world.

They didn’t know much about that final battle, they didn’t know about the alien dogs or the horrible close up view Peter had of Tony Stark’s death or how Spider-Man had curled up in a ball while unbearably powerful blasts from a massive spaceship rained down around him and the stones that would have killed everyone or how Peter woke up almost every night from those sounds and sights replaying over and over and over and over and over in his eyes until he couldn’t stand it anymore, but Peter Parker’s classmates at Midtown School of Science and Technology knew a few things.

They knew Peter Parker was Spider-Man.

They knew Peter Parker was scared of dogs.

And more than anything else, they knew the least they could do was let him be normal at school, since that was the only place he really could be normal anymore. The least they could do was go a little bit out of their own ways to let him finish high school five years late and a lot more scarred, but to finish it like a normal kid with a normal life.

Even if he wasn’t.

Because Peter Parker was Spider-Man, and Spider-Man had done so much for them.

It was the least they could do.

**Author's Note:**

> well guess who saw endgame again and cried again and also lost their shit when steve got the hammer again? this lesbian that's who! please leave a comment if you liked this, i love hearing what people think! also come hang out on tumblr @graybeard-halt!


End file.
